Oh my gods. What a great fight! Not "hard" but needs concentration. It's amazing how many people fail on that. For once, it wasn't me! I actually TOPPED damage ahead of our mage a few times.

Purr.

Just wanted to know what you guys use to soak the thingies, explosive you-know-what's, the puddles. Is Survival Instincts enough? Because for once we had a DK in the raid (filling in for our ret pally) and I had a dps symbiosis. Or do you all take damage reduction abilities like Dispersion for soaking here?

Just curious.

Have I mentioned "purr"?

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

Oh my gods. What a great fight! Not "hard" but needs concentration. It's amazing how many people fail on that. For once, it wasn't me! I actually TOPPED damage ahead of our mage a few times.

Purr.

Just wanted to know what you guys use to soak the thingies, explosive you-know-what's, the puddles. Is Survival Instincts enough? Because for once we had a DK in the raid (filling in for our ret pally) and I had a dps symbiosis. Or do you all take damage reduction abilities like Dispersion for soaking here?

Just curious.

Have I mentioned "purr"?

We had our rogues soak all of the ones in melee, I displacer'd occasionally to this or that untouched void zone. Everything else is pretty straightforward.

We used Ranged/Healers to get the Void zones in ranged and the tank that was not tanking always got the one in melee. If there were 2 in melee then I usually grabbed it. Pretty much 100% uptime on the boss.

Heroic 25 ("nothing" to do on normal):
Very straightforward fight for melee. Usually our ret paladin was taking the tears in melee (lined up with aura mastery etc). HotW tranq is great for getting up the shields after the second phase (I do this when the Blood Rage phase ends so everyone has pretty much 100% health and green shields).
Switching forms is very usefull to get rid off the slow effect for a while (until it's applied again).
Range dps/healers where spreaded around the room and everyone got his own "part" to take care of when tear appeared.
We also occasionally clean the orbs in phase 1 (the room is completely cleared after the 2nd phase - people with the debuff to run out take care of that). In Blood Rage phase we stack and two druids use Roar when the debuff lands (twice in the phase).
Stampeding Roar removes the debuff from me either when it's casted by me or by any other druid. Root removal usually works but sometimes some people were still rooted (and therefore exploded in the raid). Also try to cast Roar right after the debuff lands because the another one can't be applied until the first one ends. And when you get the debuff while having the buff, the root effect is not removed.

yesterday we did our first attempts on heroic Malkorok. A bit late i know...
Nevertheless our tanks (warrior and dk) seemed to be to weak for tanking phase 2. So i decided to skill HotW and tank it by my own. I calculated my cd's very well and on paper there was no strike that was able to oneshot me. I used Dispersion for the first 7 seconds. 6 seconds+1 second in which the Malkorok moves to me. After that i use Barkskin and Survival Instincts. During the whole duration i got Ursorcs Might up.
As i play feral the time before i got no single stack of Fatal Strike.

With HotW up i have nearly 67% dmg reduction due armor.

I calculated for myself before:
2400000*0,33*0,5*0,8 = 316800

Means while Barkskin and Survival Instincts up. Boss should hit me for arround 300k. It looked like this is pretty simpel for me to survive.
I never was that wrong...

First 7 seconds it worked well with Dispersion. Then i popped Barkskin and Survival Instinct waited for the first hit to heal me up with frenzy regeneration and.... oneshot. 1700000 dmg. I checked several times my logs but i got Survival Instincts and Barkskin up. Even if nothing else but Survival Instincts is up. Boss shouldn't hit me for more than 2400000*0,5=1200000.

I tryed this on normalmode later and i still got 620k dmg per hit with Barkskin and Survival Instincts but without HotW that means only 50% dmg reduction due Armor. So instead of 1800000*0,5*0,5*0,8 = 360000, i still got this 620k Hits. At least i survived this on normal mode....

It would be great to show some logs but there are none of this fight. I played on 10 man (heroic).
I am realy looking forward that you can show me some silly mistakes i made with my calculations.

I hope my english understandable. Ask me please if you can't figure out what i am saying on important passages.

That is because his hits ignore armor. DK and warrior really does suck for the soaking so you'll have to make quite the cooldown rotation for it to work. You could stand in there with them however, and "should" survive. I would save Dispersion for the second Blood rage.
There is another way, but I'm not sure how well it would work with dps. You could kite the boss. Our tanks once died like.. instantly on the first blood rage, so I taunted and just went running, cycling all my speed cooldowns. Nitro boots, displacer beast, Dash and then the phase was over without much issue. We wiped on 500k and had to do twice as many attempts to actually kill it sadly.

It ignores armor... i thought about it but i wasn't sure. Thank you for your quick answer. Next week we will have a paladin tanking malkorok. I believe he will be able to tank Blood rage, so i can focus on dealing damage

This is kinda fun on heroic but I have so many "jobs" I miss simply dps-ing the boss - the most I can mange is keep bleeds up most of the time. I soak the melee-range pools, at the end of the first Blood Rage I use HotW-Tranq, and in between Arcing Smashes I use my Symbiosis-Dispersion to hoover up some orbs.

This is hc 10man, btw.

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

So we just started working on heroic Mal this week and i think we are gonna struggle, and i would like to get your opinion on the matter.

We are Heroic 10m. our makeup

2 ranged (1 of which is OS heals when we need 3 heals)
2 tanks
2 healers
4 melee (1 of which is OS heals when we need to keep ranged and less melee, shaman has been the only case so far).

This is a very melee-heavy group, and up until this fight, i felt like we can/have overcome situations where this makeup is detrimental.

For heroic Mal, we are using 2-2-6.

However, we got about 15 pulls on H Malk, and granted its still early, but i can see having this many melee on this fight is going to seriously suck. Has anyone else been able to deal with this fight with a similar makeup and if so, any tips for us?

I have offered to make my OS boomkin for this to see if it helps, or alternatively go OS heals (my current OS) to provide another ranged. That said, i know the enrage timer is tight, so we are unsure if its worth that. For what its worth, my boomkin dps will probably be about 100k lower than my feral dps because of both gear, and general unfamiliarity with the spec.

Right now, what is killing us is the pools that spawn. With only 4 ranged, we have the room divided into 4 to try to assign zones we need to cover for these pools that spawn. With only 4 ranged (2 of which are healers), if you get a pool placement in the same zone as a smash, you are left with very little time to try to make it over. We have melee trying to help too, but with all the orbs up as well, that can get very tricky very fast.

Basically i am wondering if anyone has tried this with a similar makeup and/or any tips on dealing with pool assignments while dodging orbs are spawning like wildfire and smashes in inconvenient locations.

Additionaly, Phase 2 is another story, with this many melee, im not sure we can spread out enough to avoid hitting each other with displaced energy. I know there are some tricks we can use to break the roots, should it be needed, but with near-instant dispells going on, i am not sure how well that is going to work.

It depends on your actual group make up. A melee heavy group is not very good for this on 10 man. When my guild was 10 man we had 3 melee and ended up sitting 2 of them and getting in 2 more ranged with myself being the only melee on the fight.

If you have a Brewmaster or a Paladin tank, they can solo phase 2.
If you have a DK, they can pop AMS a take an pool.
Displacer Beast is awesome on this fight if you need to soak and pool.
Since there is always a melee pool, we always used the tank that wasn't tanking to grab the first 2 pools and I got the 3rd one.
As far as Displaced Energy, if your healers are instant dispelling, you aren't going to kill this boss with so many melee plain and simple. There are a couple EASY tricks to use to avoid the debuff. Druids have Stampeding Roar, SR REMOVES the debuff all together but does so without dispelling it so no explosion. If you have a Feral and a Resto, each one can get a cast of the debuff and you never have to worry about it. I did this in 10 man and now 25 man. I always roar for the first Displaced and our Resto has SR glyphed and uses it on the 2nd cast.

Any tank can solo 10H blood rage but I assume that's already happening.

You can just stack all melee on one side, wait for displaced energy, and then everyone who isn't rooted move to the other side (both "sides" being behind the boss, of course). That's what we do in 25s -- we never even bothered with stuff like stampeding roar or windwalk for that phase (preferring to use them to help people soak imploding energy in the miasma phase).

Since you have so few ranged, it's probably good to help them out by using (rogue) cloak of shadows, (monk) zen med/diffuse magic, and (druid) dispersion or divine shield to clear out orbs whenever they start to pile up. That way the ranged will have more freedom of movement. Also make sure melee/tanks are taunting in adds as soon as they spawn so that they aren't snaring the ranged.

During Blood Rage, you should be clearing the entire room (except Blood Rage's cone) of orbs, so that they aren't an issue in the next miasma phase. Usually ranged suffice for this, but melee can still grab some orbs near them. This would typically be the time to use raid healing cooldowns like ancestral guidance/healing tide, maybe even tranq, to allow the orb soakers to live.

We finally got him. The group makeup was definitely an issue but we managed to do it by assigning melee to some zones to help. I was able to keep bleeds well enough on the boss and blink/run out to a puddle to soak it without too much trouble.

Oddly enough p2 was the easy part of the fight. We just ran around and cleared orbs and didnt even really have to worry about killing the boss during that phase. Healers were insta-dispelling and i would roar to help out too.